Professional Documents
Culture Documents
On October 13, 1857, just two weeks after the original park dwellers left
their homes, the Board of Commissioners of Central Park offered prizes
of four hundred to two thousand dollars for the four best proposals for
"laying out the park." This notice for the first important landscape design
competition in the United States elicited thirty-three varied proposals,
which revealed the influence of English and continental traditions of
landscape design as well as more eclectic vernacular ideas about what
would make this public place appealing. But when the commissioners
opened the proposals six months later, they found one curious entry.
Plan 2 by an anonymous contestant was nothing but a pyramid.
Although the park commissioners themselves expected a unified
aesthetic conception of the design, their specifications mandated a mix
of facilities. They provided each competitor a copy of the topographical
map done by Egbert Viele (who had also presented an early park design
to the mayor's consulting board), with instructions that construction
cost no more than the $1.5 million authorized by the legislature. Certain
details Viele had defined as part of his park also appeared in the board's
specifications: four or more cross streets connecting Fifth and Eighth
avenues along the park's two-and-one-half-mile length; a twenty- to
forty-acre parade ground (significantly reduced from Viele's fifty acres)
with "proper arrangements for the convenience of spectators"; and
three playgrounds, three to ten acres each.